Topic > SQL

Cloudera, one company selling a commercial distribution of the Hadoop open source software for storing and processing lots of different kinds of data, has just picked up some new talent and technology by way of the acquisition of startup Xplain.io.

Nine-year-old DreamFactory Software has built open software that generates a Rest API to plug into any backend database. The company also recently raised $4 million to help it release the enterprise version of its software next year.

It’s one thing to throw data into Mode Analytics, a cloud service where analysts can run queries and share findings. It’s another thing entirely to be able to click a button and view helpful visualizations of the data in a snap.

“The big story has always been to build a really strong bottom layer that can expose different data models,” said founder Nick Lavezzo. The most important layer was SQL, the Holy Grail on the team’s docket of things to do.

Yesterday Google Research pulled the shroud off Spanner, Google’s “scalable, multi-version, globally-distributed, and synchronously-replicated database,” claiming to have created “the first system to distribute data at global scale and support externally-consistent distributed transactions.”

Imagine a functional, live, operational database living on separate servers scattered around the globe in say, San Francisco, London, Dubai, Moscow, and Johannesburg, simultaneously. Not synced, replicated, or cloned — but a single database without a single location.